Posted on August 27, 2019
Record Stupidity
This post is particularly boring and probably not worth reading. You have been warned.
So I moved into my new house a little over a week ago. One of the very first things I tried to do was set up my record player, since it was (in my mind) the easiest source of music. This was not, in fact, the case.
So the system has 4 components that all need to be connected for music to flow:
- Turntable
- Preamp
- Receiver
- Speakers
The turntable connects to the preamp with an RCA cable, which then connects to the receiver with another RCA cable. Finally, speaker wire is run from the receiver to the speakers. The turntable, preamp, and receiver all require power as well.
In the move I had misplaced my preamp and all of the wires. I had some spare wiring, but without a preamp there was nothing I could do.
My dad had a spare preamp and speaker wire, so that solved a couple issues. I managed to find a spare 12V power adapter to actually power the preamp, and things were starting to look good. However, I had no RCA cables.
I ended up finding a couple of weird component cables that I cut and half and soldered back together to create some janky (but functional component cables), before finally realizing that I had no power supply for the turntable.
At this point I decided to just give up for now since this really was becoming more hassle than it was worth. I tear everything down, admit defeat, and forget about the whole thing.
The next morning I am checking the status of my Dutch Oven (I planned on making something in it that night) and…
…
So I grab everything out of the Dutch Oven, plug it all in, and I’m listening to a Violent Femmes album in about 5 minutes.
The moral of the story is to use real (labeled) boxes when packing. Don’t be like me.
Updated on August 27, 2019
Grafana + Prometheus Monitoring
I’ve been (not very actively) looking for a monitoring solution for some time now. Yesterday I decided to check out a few good open source options, and stumbled on a Reddit post mentioning Grafana and Prometheus, so I decided to give it a shot.
Grafana is a metric visualization software. You feed it monitoring information and it can create some beautiful dashboards for you. Prometheus is a monitoring tool which utilizes its own query language (PromQL) to provide system metrics. By combining the two servers you can get some pretty nifty data visualizations.
Setting things up was pretty easy. Both Prometheus and Grafana had Apt repositories, so it was only really a matter of installing the servers, editing a couple config files, and logging into the web interface to build my dashboards. I hit a couple of snags due to some oddities with my own system, but the setup is pretty straightforward overall.
Once I had things up and running it was time to actually start monitoring. PromQL is an entirely new language and I couldn’t find particularly useful documentation, so I started off with only 2 displays: one for overall CPU utilization and one for memory.
I’d like to dig more into things down the line as Prometheus seems like a really powerful tool. Tracking HTTP requests seems pretty simple based on their documentation, and might be a cool thing to try.
I would definitely recommend using Grafana and Prometheus to someone looking for a free monitoring solution. It’s extremely customizable and you can get loads of information with Prometheus. The only issue is that it’s a bit of a pain to configure, and if you’re looking for something a bit more plug-and-play, this might not be the solution for you.
Updated on August 6, 2019
WordPress Maximum Upload Size
Another weird issue I’d been running into for ages was WordPress’s maximum file upload size. It had been defaulting to 2MB for as long as I can remember, and none of the instructions I could find online were helping.
People were recommending I edit the .htaccess file or add some lines to wp-config.php, but even with those changes I was hitting the same issue: it was locked at 2MB.
I finally thought to check the php.ini (located for posterity at /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini), searched for a line containing 2M and found this little gem:
Upped it to 64M, reloaded Apache, and everything magically began to fall into place.
Updated on August 5, 2019
Fixed Permalinks
So I’ve been trying fruitlessly to get permalinks working on this site for… longer than I’m willing to admit. I’ve been banging my head against the wall, doing full site restores, rewriting the .htaccess file, changing permissions, everything I could think of.
I finally got it working today and felt incredibly stupid. Everything was configured correctly, except for one little issue. AllowOverrides in my Apache config was disabled for /var/www, so none of my .htaccess files were even being used (unless specified within the virtual host file). I changed the line to enable overrides and permalinks immediately started working.
Something I really need to do more is to read the official documentation BEFORE I start troubleshooting. https://wordpress.org/support/article/using-permalinks/#using-pretty-permalinks had all the information I needed.
Updated on August 4, 2019
Clear Lake
I woke up today sometime around 3 AM. I’m not sure if it was due to the heat, anxiety, or some combination of the two, but, despite a few restless hours of tossing and turning (while being serenaded by the incessant whining of my cat), I was unable to fall back asleep.
I finally gave up on my attempts just before 6. I got out of bed, got dressed, ate some breakfast, and sat on my couch to watch TV. I did not, however, particularly feel like sitting around all day, so I pulled out my phone and started browsing through some of my saved hikes on AllTrails.
After some perusing I decided on Clear Lake. It was about 75 miles out of Eugene, but the hike looked gorgeous and I didn’t have anywhere to be until 2 PM, so I had time to make the drive.
I drove out there and was stunned by how clear and blue the water was. The hike was about 5 miles long, leading around the perimeter of the lake. I got there early enough that it was fairly quiet (though I did stumble upon the occasional fisherman and camper), and the water was beautifully calm.
By the time I got back to my car I was in a great mood. The fresh air and gorgeous views had cleared my head and I was ready for the week to begin.
Updated on August 5, 2019
Hello World!
Ok, after my last site crashed and burned due to an SSL error that I won’t go too far into (somehow Apache had multiple certs associated with the site. It was weird), I’ve decided to build a new one. Had no disaster recovery in place, so I decided to just nuke the database and start from scratch.
And of course the first thing I did this time around was to install a backup plugin.
UPDATE: Ended up losing the site again but I was able to restore from a backup this time, so we’ll just pretend that I was testing my disaster recovery protocols.